Legality is irrelevant unless you go to court. There is about 0% chance of any creative commons contributor suing eBay over this, and even if they did, they would be unlikely to prevail. It is hard to show monetary damage from diminished "sales" of a free product, and eBay is not the party doing the infringing. They are just providing a marketplace.

You hate corporations? Hmm... That seems a bit misguided. Do you actually know what a corporation is? No, seriously, do you know what a corporation is? It's okay to say you do not. There are quite a few people who seem to have absolutely no clue what a corporation is.

I have considered creating a small one in the past. Not too much paperwork, but the lawyer wanted paying.

You do NOT need a lawyer to form a corporation. You can start a corporation on-line for about $200, in about 30 minutes. I own four: One California corp, one Nevada corp, one Delaware corp, and one company in the Cayman Islands. All except for the California corp are just private mailboxes, but they are still useful for shuffling money around to minimize taxes. Unless you make all your money on a W-2, you are foolish not to incorporate at least once.

It is also nice to take a vacation to the Caribbean, and write it off on my taxes as a business expense. All I have to do is schedule a board meeting, with only myself as sole board member in attendance. I don't even need to rent a meeting room, since there is no law that the meeting can't be held on the beach.

They're relatively inexpensive and the paperwork is tit-easy. It's easy enough that I can do it. I don't, but I can. I've done it and had it checked. I have oft-repeated that many folks here should look into the benefits of incorporation and hiring an accountant. Chances are good that the two will save you more than they cost. You don't need to hire an accountant but it's not easy to stay up-to-date with tax law changes and an accountant can often get better results than you can. On top of that, an accounta

Do the paperwork yourself and have it checked by a lawyer. It's really not expensive. You can do it on your own if you want but I've never done it without getting it checked. I mostly get it checked because I want to share liability.;-)

Looking through their recent listings, they have a ton of IP issues outside of the MakerBot issue. I see unlicensed Star Wars, GoT, Pokemon, etc. Some big company is going to come along and sue the shit of them.

As I type this, the license link [creativecommons.org] on the product's page [thingiverse.com] leads to the variant of the Creative Commons License, that explicitly allows commercial use:

You are free to:
Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.
The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.

What's the problem? Did the author pick wrong license by mistake — and will they apologize to the folks now harmed by eBay's overreaction?

Mixed in among the 2,000 odd items lifted by JustPrint3D - not just Sad Face! - were various forms of the CC license, including Non-Commercial. Beyond simply profiting, JustPrint3D wasn't providing compliant attribution on anything. It was a mess.

This is why I don't like it when people just say "Creative Commons License". There are very different Creative Commons Licenses out there, some allow commercial use, some forbid commercial use, some forbid forbidding commercial use. They need to be more specific to avoid confusion like this. Although TFA says this, but they left that out on the Slashdot post

Well, sir, then your write-up is screwed-up. Because, according to it, the problem was the "scraping" and the use without permission (rather than "without attribution").

Really, this isn't that hard.

1. They were using it without giving attribution.

2. The creator didn't give permission for unattributed use.

3. They were using it without permission.

The fact that permission would have been available, if they had followed the terms of a license, doesn't mean they almost had permission, or mostly had permission. Nope, since they didn't accept the license offered, they have no license granted whatsoever.

It wouldn't be very hard for them to run the same business in a compliant manner. They could charge just for the printing service and require the consumer to download the files directly from thingaverse them upload them to the seller.

They could charge just for the printing service and require the consumer to download the files directly from thingaverse

That's not necessary at all. According to clarifications from the submitter, for most items the problem was simply lack of attribution. So, if they just included the link to the originals and to the license in their eBay descriptions, they would've been in the clear for most items (including the one used by the submitter as an example).

They could charge just for the printing service and require the consumer to download the files directly

Not necessary the customer has to be forced to do it directly... they could use a 3rd party mirror of Thingaverse, which is some separate website that provides all content in a CC-compliant manner.....

Then through the magic of "Web services APIs"; in their Online checkout store, provide a User Interface, where the user can just select from the library the file to direct-download which

As I type this, the license link [creativecommons.org] on the product's page [thingiverse.com] leads to the variant of the Creative Commons License, that explicitly allows commercial use:

You are free to:

Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format

Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.

The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.

What's the problem? Did the author pick wrong license by mistake — and will they apologize to the folks now harmed by eBay's overreaction?

You forgot the "Under the Following Terms" bit, which is the whole point!

Under the following terms:

Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

As I type this, the license link [creativecommons.org] on the product's page [thingiverse.com] leads to the variant of the Creative Commons License, that explicitly allows commercial use

I was wondering about that too. I thought perhaps I misunderstood the license or had missed something, but on the face of it, it seems like what they did was legal (perhaps a little sleazy, but still legal).

If someone more familiar with this could explain specifically what they did that was infringing or illegal, I'd be interested to know what it was.

And what if it was a Font distributed under a CC license? If you make a printed poster with words rendered from those fonts, does it have to have attribution of the font authors? A font is instructions for producing a shape (much like the 3D design files).

However, that might just illustrate the limitations of copyright law. I'm not sure it's 100% fair to the creator, either.

It's nothing to do with license. The output of running code is not subject to the copyright of the code itself. A font is a program for generating text. A drawing made in Photoshop is not subject to Adobe's copyright either.

For a font it definitely does, if you do not have the rights to use the font the output is also tainted since it's just many copies of a copyrighted work. Not that it means the text falls under the fonts copyright. That's far different than using unlicensed software to create a picture.

By failing to attribute the authors they lost their right to use those things. I can not print out a copyrighted picture and sell it without being granted that right by the copyright holder thats pretty much settled law an

You may not be able to embed the font in a PDF due to copyright, but if you're printing there are zero legal restrictions. You just can't embed the font (copyright) or use the font's name (trademark).

A 3D Printer isn't printing out an image. It sort of depends on the file format structure - if it's a 3D "image" vs programmatic instructions. The output of a computer program is not subject to the same copyright as the program itself. AutoCAD files are where

Font cant be copyrighted in the US so it's an apples to oranges. I was incorrect in assuming fonts can be copywritten in the US.

You're splitting hairs related to how it's encoded with pictures. A PNG is simple enough but encode it in an SVG and suddenly it looses copyright? I realy doubt a sane court is going to care about encoding when at the end of the day you made a visualy exact duplicate. By your logic if I make a bit of code to print out a barbie doll it's perfectly legal to do so? Pretty sure Ma

Read your own link: attribution is required with the CC-BY license. The eBay seller was not providing any attribution to the creators of the designs, and when they were called out on it, they claimed that it was eBay's fault for not letting them post links. Moreover, not everyone was using the CC-BY license. Many of them were using the CC-BY-NC [creativecommons.org] license that requires attribution and disallows commercial use, yet the eBay seller was both using those designs commercially and failing to provide attribution.

This was also covered about a week ago on HackADay: http://hackaday.com/2016/02/22... [hackaday.com]
"Most of the uploaded CAD models on Thingiverse are done under the Creative Commons license, which is pretty clear in its assertion that anyone can profit from the work. This would seem to put the eBay store owner in the clear for selling the work, but it should be noted that he’s not properly attributing the work to the original creator. "
The only part that he's violating is that there's no attribution.

who cares? if slashdot thinks it's ok to copy and share movies and music, there is nothing wrong with this

Au contraire mon ami

You left out the part where the music is then burned to an optical disc and sold without a link to the torrent site you got it from./. does NOT condone such activities! The link to the torrent site must be included.

You can't kill a corporation, you can only sue them out of existence and take all of their assets. I'm sure statutory damages for willful infringement would have been sufficient. but nobody bothers to register their CC works, so it's merely treble damages. And no lawyer is going to take on an IP case for $10,000 in crappy prints.

Without that attribution, there is no license. You're saying, essentially, that the stuff in the store is all there for people to take, and the only crime the shoplifter committed was not paying for them. Exactly. Without paying, you're not allowed to take.

I wonder however if printing the design would be considered transformitive. There was a case a while ago where an 'artist' was printing instagram photos, adding a 1-2 word caption and that was decided in his favour.

I'm fairly certain it doesn't matter according to copyright law (which may only be loosely related to specific court rulings) - even if it's transformative, it's still a derivative work, and hence should require a license to the original.

Actually, I'm fairly certain you *can't* copyright a recipe, only a specific layout, etc. of it. And that has nothing to do with KFC - they're relying on trade secrets, which is a completely unrelated field of law.

The rusted out body of a Model A for 18K+ when you can buy a beautiful fully restored working Model As for as little 16,000

If you don't shop around expect to be taken advantage of.

In defense of that guy, a lot of people don't know what something is worth, or understand that they need to price their products at market level. If you get angry at overpriced Ebay listings, don't go shopping on Craigslist for anything with a steep depreciation curve. Sometimes the prices are laughable.

From the looks of things... The tires, wheels, brakes, the mirrors, and I think the glass are all recreations and the rubber's not even anything that was available for that model - never mind that it looks like they're radials (I can't really be certain but the sidewalls look pretty strong so they're almost certainly belted). I suspect the body is, at some point, still original in that, yeah, it had some original metal left.

So yeah, a "restored" A might be worth that. I didn't view your original link but an

Instead he could have said, "Oh, I didn't realize there were multiple licenses and that some require attribution. I'll go ahead and fix those now. It will take me a couple of days to get them updated." Would have maintained plausible deniability, this whole thing would have blown over, and he'd still have a shop.

Unlike digital data and software, physical hardware has a cost of distribution. He is offering a 3D printing service to people without a 3D printer. The sale price pays for the time his printer is occupied, materials, and his time maintaining the system. In contrast, the designs only have a cost associated with initial production. Once that cost has been paid, the cost to store, maintain, and distribute the design is virtually nil.

This is the same silliness as the court decision which shut down Aereo [wikipedia.org]

Most of what's on Thingiverse appears to be available under CC-Attribution, all that's needed would be to do that attribution and he'd be in the clear. Thingiverse even has an API to get the information automatically, to verify license status.

Instead, he seems to think that anything on the Internet is public domain and he can do whatever he wants. Good luck with that!

I don't know if the "no commercial use" CC licenses would bar this - sell it as a service to print designs for an individual rather than sel

The other one yesterday:Actual: Mercedes-Benz Swaps Robots For People On Assembly LinesQ? Which way is it going people out or robots outCorrect: Mercedes-Benz Removes Robots For People On Assembly Lines

Or is this a new strategy Huffinghtonpost style - creating questions in headlines to make people look at content - new in the beginning but now sucks overall.

That's but a breeze compared to the hurricane that's gonna blow our way once people start printing car parts and car manufacturers get up in arms over not being able to sell some plastic parts worth 5 cents for 50+ bucks.

"Scraping" refers to "copying the content off of some website". It is adapted from the older term "screen scraping", which is copying the data from someone else's visual presentation of this data. This usually implies that you don't have access to the underlying data in a more convenient form (such as files or a database or an API), so you have to reconstruct it from some source that either wasn't intended to promote the efficient transfer of the data or was actually designed to make that transfer as difficult as possible, for IP reasons.

But they were NOT "scraping" the designs. They were downloading the design files directly, using an interface set up for exactly that purpose. Do you call it "scraping" when someone uses Github? This is no different. The downloading was perfectly legal, and there is no technical barrier to them, or anyone, who wants to do so. The (possibly) illegal part was the selling, not the downloading.

Note: What JustPrint3D was doing may not actually be illegal. Anti-trust laws in America prohibit a manufacturer

Anti-trust laws in America prohibit a manufacturer or distributor from fixing prices.

Anti-trust laws do not prevent the copyright owner from fixing prices, however, and they can.

Occasionally copyright owners provide a distribution agreement where 99% or 100% of all profits go to the copyright owner, and the merchant/distributor is only allowed to resell according to the author's policies.

Also, copyright owners occasionally provide gratis copies for special purposes --- for example, pre-release reviews or screeners. Just because there is no fee, does not mean the movie theaters that received these exclusive media can legally make and distribute copies.

I disagree. They were scraping. Scraping doesn't have any additional connotations unless attached. It may even be done with permission. Knowing that you like to argue, I've gone ahead and grabbed a citation for this:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

IMO they are different things. Copying might mean that an employee of the shop downloaded designs from thingiverse and listed them for sale on ebay. Steals or infringes is pretty vague in terms of is actually happening.

It seems reasonable for the author to assume that the audience of this site knows what scraping is, and it is a more precise word for what happened than copying, stealing or infringing. Scraping implies a scripted, automated effort with little human intervention past the point of building the script. There is no selection in terms of, 'hey, this looks neat - I'm going to sell those'; it is a complete replication of a catalogue without intervention.

Hate to say this but it's true. Many, I dare say most, people aren't actually interested in learning. They're not interested in constructive dialogue. They're not interested in changing their minds when presented with new information. They aren't interested in honest debate. They're not interested in accepting that they're wrong and adjusting their beliefs accordingly. They're sure as hell not interested in improving themselves because improving themselves involves both work and admission that they're less than perfect.

And, more on topic, scraping is a more specific type of copying. Being specific is a good thing. It means less confusion for those who actually understand the issues. Those who don't understand the issues probably don't have opinions of any value and can be discounted or ignored. Why they feel compelled, or perhaps entitled, to have a valued opinion is probably also a matter of ego - akin to needing to admin that they're not perfect in order to be willing to learn.

Scraping is using a computer to read data from a (human readable) website and extract formatted computer data. So an app might search the slashdot homepage, look for links with text of a certain size and colour, and produce a list of titles. That would be "scraping".

I don't understand the entire artticle never mind the headline. If the guy objects to his designs being used without his permission he should have reserved copyright.. instead of assigning CC to it. Dumb. As far as people using an actual copyrighted design or whatever to sell on ebay.. lately it looks to me like ebay has been really sloppy allowing questionable items to slip by (cassette tapes in my case). Personally I don't give a rat's #$$ about if they're there or not becase I can tell the difference

Oh look, we aren't at the end of the process, so there is no process. Great conclusion. Did you point out to everyone in 1975 that the Internet was shite and the information revolution was a load of bollocks?